by Phil Rickman
The cold came for her again, and she went scurrying back into the hall.
‘Jane!’
Nothing. Merrily pulled her robe together and ran upstairs, two flights, to what Jane liked to call her apartment, in the attic. A big bedsit, essentially, with all the kid’s spooky books, her desk, her stereo, her CDs. The door was hanging open. Merrily snapped on the light and saw the duvet in a heap, one pillow on the floor.
What was this about? Jane waking up aggrieved because her craven parent hadn’t stood up at last night’s meeting and fought for Coleman’s Meadow? She hadn’t seemed annoyed last night, but Jane . . . one day she might become vaguely predictable, no signs of that yet.
Merrily sat on an edge of the bed, wondering what it would be like this time next year when Jane was gone. Was she really going to carry on here on her own? With Lol on his own in Lucy’s old house? If they put this place on the market, the Church could clean up. The Old Vicarage, Ledwardine, 17th century, seven bedrooms, guest-house potential. One day they’d do it, transfer the vicar to one of the estate houses, and on mornings like this it didn’t seem such a bad idea.
A videotape was projecting from the vintage VCR under Jane’s analogue TV. Give the kid her due, she’d never pined for home cinema – on a vicar’s stipend, still many years away.
The tape was labelled T-1 Feb. Recorded last winter, long before Jane had been drawn towards a career in archaeology. Trench One was never less than watchable but not exactly crucial viewing. Why this one now?
Oh, and you’ll never guess – the kid calling back casually over her shoulder as she went upstairs to bed last night – who’s going to be in charge of the dig. Merrily waiting in vain for a name, but Jane always liked suspense.
Activating the VCR and the TV, Merrily shoved in the tape and watched pre-credit shots of a sinister grey landcape under a sky tiered with clouds like stacked shelves.
A man appeared, solid, bulky, shot from below the tump he was standing on. Trench One had three regular presenters who took turns to direct an excavation, present a different viewpoint, argue over the results. It was about conflict and competition.
‘So we’ve studied the reports of the original 1963 dig . . .’
He was wearing some kind of bush shirt, with badges sewn on, an Army beret and jeans with ragged holes in the knees. In case anyone had any doubts, the caption spelled out:
Prof. William Blore.
‘. . . been over the geophysics, taken a stack of aerial pictures, and it now seems pretty clear to me that this is where we need to sink . . .’ Lavish grin splashing through smoky stubble. ‘Trench One!’
Blore jumping down from the tump and standing for a moment rubbing his hands like he couldn’t wait to get into the soil, and then the sig tune coming up in a storm of thrash-metal as he slid on his dark glasses and people began to gather around him.
Young people, his students. Trench One had begun as an Open University programme on BBC 2. Very rapidly acquiring a cult following, which built and built until they gave it peak screening. The format had altered slightly: Blore as guru, channelling youthful vigour. Merrily recalled a profile in one of the Sunday magazines describing him as genial, profane and disarmingly intolerant.
She stopped the tape. Red herring, surely. No way would Coleman’s Meadow be put into the hands of the man who’d told BBC Midlands Today that anyone who thought the Bronze Age builders of the Dinedor Serpent were primitive obviously hadn’t met the philistines running Herefordshire Council.
Wondering how genial, profane and disarmingly intolerant might translate.
‘What do you think, Lucy?’
She looked up at the framed photo over a stack of Jane’s esoteric books. An elderly woman in her winter poncho. The wide-brimmed hat throwing a tilted shadow across bird-of-prey features blurred by the process of turning away. Jane had found the picture in the vestry files and cleaned it up, had copies made and framed the original.
The only known portrait of Lucy Devenish who, like the old Indian warriors she’d so resembled, had probably thought cameras could steal your soul.
Merrily thought the picture looked unusually grey and flat this morning, lifeless.
The river was still frothing like cappuccino in the lamplight, but at least he wasn’t going anywhere new.
And the rain had eased. There was some ground mist, but the sky was clearing. Looking up, Jane saw the morning star pulsing like a distant lamp.
A breathing space. She walked slowly back up Church Street towards the square. Most of the guys at school hated getting up in the morning, but she’d never found it a problem. Around dawn you were more receptive to . . . impressions.
Was that weird? Was she weird? Over the last couple of years, she’d done all the usual stuff – been totally hammered on cider, got laid – but somehow it wasn’t enough. Was she alone at Moorfield High in thinking it wasn’t enough?
Probably.
There were very few lights in Church Street, none in Lucy’s old house where Lol lived now. Sometimes, pre-dawn, you’d see him by lamplight, working on a song for his second solo album, at his desk under the window. But Lol had been at the meeting with Mum, listening to Pierce’s New Ledwardine bullshit, which was enough to sap anybody’s creativity.
A breeze blundered into the square, ripping away the mist like a lace-curtain and rattling the stacks of morning papers barricading the doorway of the Eight Till Late. The only sign of life. Not long ago, even in the bleak midwinter, you’d have had clinking milk bottles and the warm aroma of baking bread. Preparations for a day. Now even the morning post wouldn’t be here for hours, and the milk came in plastic bottles in the supermarkets, and soon nobody would be seen on the streets of Ledwardine until about ten when the dinky delicatessen opened for croissants.
Jane stopped on the edge of the square and looked out, over the crooked, 16th-century black and white houses and shuttered shops, towards Cole Hill, the first point of contact with each new day. Hearing Mum again, from last night.
I won’t dress this up, flower. When the stones are exposed and studied or measured or whatever happens, they want them taken away. Possibly erected somewhere else. Or . . . not erected.
This was Lyndon Pierce plus transient scum like Ward Savitch, of pheasant-holocaust fame. Mum had admitted she’d managed to say nothing; as the meeting was supposed to be for public information only, the words powder and dry had seemed appropriate. Jane was aware of trembling.
The church clock said 6.30, just gone. Still a while off daylight, and Mum wouldn’t be up for another half-hour. Jane walked under the lych-gate and into the churchyard, switching on her lamp, cutting an ochre channel through the mist which put ghostly wreaths around the graves.
The beam seemed to find its own way to the only stone with a quotation from Thomas Traherne:
No more shall clouds eclipse my treasures
Nor viler shades obscure my highest pleasures . . .
Jane knelt. If she was late for breakfast, late for school, it didn’t matter. This was important. This was the person to whom she’d have to answer if the village lost its ancient heart.
‘Lucy,’ she whispered to the headstone, ‘the bastards want to have them ripped out. Put on a flatbed truck and taken away.’
Sometimes, when she was on her own in the early morning or at twilight, calm and focused, she’d almost see Lucy Devenish, eagle-faced and huddled in her poncho on the edge of some folkloric otherworld.
‘So, like, if there’s anything you can do?’
She’d been coming here every day for weeks now, far longer than she’d been going to the river. Talking to Lucy, keeping her up to date. It was important.
Jane looked up to see only steeple, mist and morning star, felt damp seeping through the knees of her jeans. She stood up, on the edge of the old coffin path along which the dead of Ledwardine had once been carried.
As she walked away, there was a tiny sound like a snapping twig on the path to her left, as if som
eone was walking beside her. Only some small mammal, but it made her smile as she set off along the ancient trackway which would later proceed, in perfect alignment with the gateways at each end of Coleman’s Meadow, to the Iron Age camp on Cole Hill.
It was like you were walking the border between worlds. Walking with ghosts. Could be down to Bill Blore, now, to stop the sacrilege, let Lucy walk in peace.
A voice came bubbling in the soggy air.
It said, ‘Who’s Lucy?’
Lol lay listening to the gunslinger wind prowling Church Street. Scared now. For a couple of days after London, it had been simple bewilderment and gratitude to whatever had got him through it. But this morning he’d awoken into darkness, the swaggering wind, anxiety.
Five days ago now, London, and reduced to a dream-sequence. Last night, to put it in its place, he’d been set on doing something real. Like maybe standing up and laying into Lyndon Pierce, this bastard who last summer had said to him, If certain people who en’t local don’t like the way we do things round yere, seems to me they might think about moving on.
Moving on? In London for just two days, Lol had been semi-paralysed by a fear of not getting back.
He looked up at the oak beam over the bed, thinking about its permanence, how it had become stronger with age. How, if you tried to bang a nail into it now, the nail would snap off.
A lot like the woman who used to live here.
But how unlike either the woman or the beam he was.
Remembering the routine cowardice assailing him as he’d climbed on the stool with his guitar to do ‘Baker’s’ in the big BBC studio, surrounded by an audience top-heavy with real musicians. Superstitiously sure he was going to fail because he was playing the Takamine rather than the ill-fated Boswell.
I want to know about everything, Jane had demanded when he finally did get home. Everything and everybody.
Lol had said they’d probably view the performance and then decide to lose him from the final edit. Jane had looked sinister. ‘Only if Holland and his producer want to be stalked for the rest of their lives by a vicar’s psychotic daughter with a machete.’
He’d smiled and told her everything. Everything he could remember about his big day out in the big city, recording ‘The Baker’s Lament’ for BBC 2’s flagship music programme, Later With Jools Holland. The New Year’s Eve programme. Hadn’t realised until he was in the studio that this was the one where they all had to feign excitement as the hands of the big clock closed in on midnight and the pipers waded in. A producer had said they’d have to do it live next year, in line with the BBC’s new drive towards truth and honesty.
Lol had been the cameo act, of course, the one-song guy – the big stars did three numbers – but it had been preceded, unexpectedly, by an interview with Jools. The great man decently glossing over Lol’s weird years, before screening a 30-second clip from the award-winning independent film about the death of village life, for which Lol’s music was the soundtrack. The micro-budget movie that was turning ‘The Baker’s Lament’ into a fluke Christmas minor hit, turning Lol’s long-dormant career around.
What he remembered most about the actual recording was not the cameras, or the one chord-change his fingers fluffed, but a bunch of people in the studio audience, swaying and mouthing the words of the chorus:
. . . we paid for all that we used
Now the money’s all spent
That’s the Baker’s Lament
One of the mouthers, unless he’d imagined all this, had been Michael Stipe of REM, benignly smiling and inclining his long bony head. Jane had been wildly impressed. Lol, too, at the time, obviously. Before it was all put into a hard perspective by his next clear memory, of a guy approaching him afterwards, explaining that he was putting together an American tour for Original Sin and how would Lol feel about being considered for the support?
Five weeks, in the spring, the guy said. Someone else, who he’d declined to name, had pulled out, so they’d need to know fairly soon if Lol was up for it.
Five weeks.
All Lol remembered about his own response was,
‘I’m thirty-nine.’
The guy laughing and slapping him on the shoulder, telling him that America didn’t have an ageism problem on anywhere near the scale of Britain’s and, anyway, Lol looked younger, and the Sin guys loved his music. Adding, with unmoving eyes, ‘You may never get a time like this again. You know what I mean by a time? When the right people know your songs?
Lol hadn’t told Merrily. Whatever she really felt, she’d be twisting his arm to go for it. Fifteen years ago, if he hadn’t, at the time, been a guest of the psychiatric health system, he’d have signed the contract before he left the capital.
Now he thought only about the wearying cycle of soundchecks and encores curtailed because the audience had paid to see the act that came next. Bars and towns, towns and bars that all looked the same, clapboard motels with sunken beds and rusty showers.
Plus, there was a message on his answering machine from Barry at the Black Swan. Need an answer today, Lol. Before lunchtime, preferably. I can get posters done in a couple of hours, but I need to know.
Unnerved, Lol rolled out of bed, went to the window.
He was panting.
He looked across the narrowing street to the matching black and white timber-framed 17th-century terrace with its winter-empty window boxes and the holly wreaths on its front doors and a few lights still on, more than usual because half of the houses were holiday homes now, coming alive for Christmas.
Lol turned, his face against the wet glass, to see the front garden of the vicarage and . . .
. . . Merrily, in jeans and a big sweater, looking up and down the dripping street in the half-light, as if she’d lost something. Her face soft and pale, hair over her eyes.
Lol just wanted to run down and hold her.
The condensation was cold on his cheek.
Merrily. Merrily and the songs. Nothing else. OK, maybe occasional gigs to keep your hand in and your mortgage payments met, your professional confidence afloat.
You only had one life and his was half gone and if he couldn’t spend all of the rest of it with the woman who’d really turned him around, what was the point?
You know what I mean by a time? When the right people know your songs?
Lol looked up at the oak beam. How old? Four hundred years? Longer, maybe twice as long, because it had been a tree, born into red Welsh Border soil.
The guy had been wrong.
The right people didn’t know his songs.
He’d toured a wide area of western Britain, but not within ten miles of this village. All the times Barry at the Black Swan had invited him to do a gig, and Lol had backed off.
Because, apart from Barry, nobody who lived here had ever acknowledged what he did. None of the locals, none of the incomers. He doubted anyone in Ledwardine had ever bought his solo album and certainly not anything he’d done years ago with Hazey Jane.
A cold audience. He’d played twice, in the past year, to cold audiences. He’d played in bars where they carried on drinking and chatting amongst themselves. He’d played one pub where a dozen people had carried their drinks outside because they couldn’t hear themselves laugh. It hadn’t mattered that much; he just wouldn’t go back there again.
But this . . . was where he lived. In Lucy’s old house – there should be a blue plaque outside. This was where he wrote the songs that were so much a part of who he was. That, in some ways, were all that he was. If he said no to Barry, it was cowardice. Ledwardine would have good reason to despise him.
But if he said yes, and Ledwardine despised him . . .
Lol saw Merrily looking down the street directly towards this window, and pulled his face away, stood clutching the wooden sill with both hands while the west wind rattled the panes as if it was trying to shake some sense into him.
The whining of the wind seeming to echo Councillor Pierce.
Grow or die.
Where the Dead Walk
TWO WOMEN IN a graveyard before dawn . . . this was not the kind of encounter you could easily walk away from. A sense of déjà vu had thrown Jane off balance, but she kept on walking along the side of the church, the woman and the wind keeping pace with her.
‘Been out every morning for about a week or something,’ the woman said, ‘and there hasn’t been anything much in the way of decent light at all. Rather hoping today was going to be the breakthrough. No chance.’
Jane’s lamplight had found the costly lustre of a big camera with a fat lens, the kind of kit that made Eirion’s prized SLR look like a budget disposable from Tesco.
‘Yeah.’ She looked up; the sky was paler, but there were none of the pastel streaks that preceded an actual sunrise. ‘We get a clear night, and then it all closes in again.’
‘What are you, a poacher?’
‘Do I look like a poacher?’
‘Dunno. Too dark to see. I was thinking, the lamp? Don’t poachers lamp things?’
‘So I believe,’ Jane said. ‘But, like, not often at a quarter to seven in the morning.’
Incomers: what could you say?
Be a bit rude to lamp her directly, but the haze on the edge of the beam had revealed bushy red-gold hair, and the posh, musky voice suggested fairly young – probably a bit younger than Mum, maybe early thirties? Still sexy, anyway, and aware of it.
The déjà vu had explained itself – Jane recalling meeting another photographer, from the Guardian, one afternoon last summer when they’d been trying to get publicity for the campaign. This had also followed a visit to Lucy’s grave. It was like Lucy was the catalyst, her grave a live place. The idea made Jane feel happier. She asked the woman where she was from and got a vague arm-wave towards the orchard.
‘Oh . . . down there.’
‘No, I mean who are you with? Which paper?’